The Harmonium is an electric musical keyboard instrument on the twelve-tone scale, and was developed as a portable alternative to the classic church organ, which was permanently installed in churches and places of worship, due to its very large size. The harmonium stands out for its capacity to produce a wide range of timbres (folk musicians call them “registra”), combining different harmonic sound frequencies that create consonances. It is thought to have been invented in Paris, in 1842, by Alexandre Debain; the electric version appeared in the mid-1930s (e.g. Hammond B3). Since the 1970s, the harmonium gradually began to give way to synthesizers, which can produce an even broader range of timbres. Indeed, since 1984-7, synthesizers have had the capacity to reproduce sounds from digital samples of real musical instruments (e.g. the KORG M1 synthesizer). In the last few years, however, there has been a tendency among musicians to return to the harmonium, and a number of popular harmonium models (e.g. the KORG CX3) have been re-launched, as a result.